Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about whether you should block buyers with low feedback from buying your items on eBay.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast -Should You Block Buyers With Low Feedback From Buying Your Items On eBay?
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about buyers on eBay. Should you block a buyer that has low feedback from buying your items?
Rob: Alright guys. Today we are talking about buyer requirements. Should you block buyers who have a low or zero feedback from actually being able to bid on your items?
Melissa: And yeah, we're gonna dive into it because there's a couple different things to consider before blocking a buyer with low feedback.
Should you or shouldn't you? It kind of depends on your business and where you're at in your business.
Rob: That's it. So let me start off by saying three out of our last 12 buyers have had either zero feedback, or
Melissa: Two had zero and one had one.
Rob: One. So, less than five feedback. And guess how much money, we created out of those three buyers, was $10,000 or $12,000 those buyers are responsible for out of our last 12 transactions. So that kind of gives you our answer, but let's walk through it and break it down a little bit more than that, so about what you should do in your business and what's right for your business.
Melissa: Yeah. So why would you want to, as a seller, why would I want to block a buyer that has low feedback.
Give me a couple reasons.
Rob: Yes. So typically somebody who has low feedback is new to the eBay game and doesn't really understand everything about eBay. So that's one thing you can think about when you're selling an item. Do you want those newbies coming in and creating havoc in your eBay store, you know what I mean? Buying something, not paying for it, and then having issues because they don't really understand how eBay works. That's one reason why you would want to buy somebody with a low or no feedback.
Melissa: Yeah. You'd wanna think that they could be potentially be a more difficult customer cuz they don't understand.
Or if they give you an offer and then you don't pay or win an auction and don't pay or whatever it is. And like you said, so, but there's another reason too could be what?
Rob: Well, I'll play devil's advocate with you.
Melissa: Sorry, I lost my train of thought.
Rob: That's alright. I'll play devil's advocate with you on this.
So let's say the buyers who bought our items, eBay throws every listing onto Google. If I'm searching for an item, through Google and it has my item or the brand name or model, whatever it is like that somebody's looking for, eBay's gonna throw that, or Google's gonna throw that to the potential buyer.
And they might not have an eBay account, but you're giving them an amazing price on eBay versus them going and buying it from the manufacturer. So they're gonna jump over to eBay, they're gonna create an eBay account, set it all up so they can buy your item. That's the reason why we do not restrict buyers is because a lot of our buyers will come off of Google, find the best price. We offer, the best price possible out there, anywhere on the internet, and it's on eBay.
That's how they have to complete it. So they set up their account. They don't have any feedback or they have low feedback. And that's how they find us and actually go through with the sale.
Melissa: Yeah. And we actually noticed a really big uptick in, people with new accounts during the pandemic a couple years ago.
So when that started, a lot more people were buying stuff online obviously. And a lot more new accounts came through. So, we don't limit it. We did used to limit to, it had to be under 10. You can't block people, under 10. Now it's under five. So you can block, yeah, that's some criteria, anybody who has 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, anything under five, so you can prevent them from actually bidding on or purchasing your items, in your back office, you can do that. So.
Rob: That's it. So now when would you want to block a buyer? And this is what you have to think about on the other side of it as well. If you're new to eBay, you're gonna have a lot of scammers coming out of the woodworks to try and scam you because they think you don't know what you're doing.
Melissa: Because you have low feedback.
Rob: Exactly. Now those scammers are gonna be the same way. They create new accounts, they get blocked, they get kicked off eBay, they go create another account. They do this back and forth, back and forth. So the people who are scammers typically will have no feedback or zero feedback. And if you are new too, you'll have those people reach out to you.
So that might be a good solution for you to keep away from those people is blocking anybody with five feedback or less, from actually buying your items. So it'll keep more of the scammers away from you if you choose to do that when you are starting out and trying to build your business on eBay.
Melissa: Yeah, and I can't, like, we don't ever hardly deal with any scammers on eBay at like who trying to just reach out, get information, or say like, oh look, we paid like all the stuff that people try to get you to do. We get them all the time on marketplace, but on eBay, because we have so much, we have, is it, what do you have?
500, five something, 500 something. They, and I would say they probably drop off after like 10 or 20 feedback. They really don't mess with people that have over 10 feedback because they know like, okay, well they've been on this a little bit. They know what they're doing. Unless it's all buyer feedback, then maybe they might, when you start selling, So just beyond aware of that and know when you first start that people will reach out.
They'll be like, they'll try to get personal information as one, cuz they sell personal information as one of the scams. And we've talked about this in other podcasts and other videos. But also another scam is they'll tell you that they paid or they send you an email to your PayPal account or whatever saying, look, it's in your account, and then it's not there.
And so just verify that your funds are there and if you keep all communication through eBay. Yeah. And you can even talk to eBay, say, hey, can you verify that the funds are there? And if they're there, I can go ahead and ship the item. If they're not there, then you just tell the person you can't ship the item.
Rob: Yeah. And eBay will they, they're so up to date. Now, if the buyer does not pay for the item, they won't allow you to create the label to ship the item. So, it's pretty much foolproof, if the buyer's telling you they paid and they did this and that. If you stay on platform with your messaging, with your buying and all that stuff, stay on eBay to do all that, work everything through eBay, you really don't have anything to worry about. But those are really the two options that you have for either blocking or not blocking a buyer. And it really boils down to your personal business. Am I new to eBay? Do I wanna make sure I'm not gonna have more scammers reaching out because I am new?
Or am I a, a veteran eBay eBayer, who has sold a lot of stuff? Do I really need to block buyers? And in our case, we don't do it because we get buyers coming in, who will spend big money with us because they found us on Google, set up an account just to buy our item that we have on there. So I don't wanna limit or discourage those people.
And I'm on the other side of that. I just had somebody buy something with two feedback, when was it, two or three days ago? Yeah, couple days ago, spend $4,500. They bought one of the stretchers that we had listed. They, sorry, they didn't buy it. They won the auction. They sent me an offer on it.
Melissa: And you accepted it.
Rob: I accepted the offer to go through with it. And then they just ghosted, they didn't say anything else. They didn't pay, they didn't do anything. So two days later I messaged and said, hey, are you having problems with fulfilling this? Do you have your account set up so you can pay for it? And they wrote back and said, yeah, we thought it was a different model than what it was.
So no, we don't need it anymore. Not my problem, but that shows you some of the issues that you might have. To me, I'm okay with that. I just go and re-list it. I'll find more people who will want it and buy it. It's very, the negatives much, or I'm sorry, the positives much outweigh the negatives for me in the situation.
That I wanna give people the benefit, the benefit of the doubt and allow them to buy our items if they do not have feedback. Because on our personally to us, we've a lot better results on people who have low feedback than people who buy and then they don't actually go through with the transaction.
Melissa: Yeah. So for us it's worth it. It might not be worth it though if you're a high volume seller. So we don't sell high volume. We talk about this all the time. We do lower amount of items, usually around 80 to a hundred items a year. And so we're not selling super high volume. So you could, I could see as a high volume seller, you might not want to mess with people with that have, you know, and maybe your experience is different. You can let us know if you do sell a lot of, a lot of volume, if you notice that the people who have under five feedback or zero feedback don't pay, or they don't, and usually that's on offers, right. That they don't pay. Yeah. So, you know, you let us know if that is your case or you accept 'em and you don't really notice they're just one of every so often for like everybody else, so. Yep. So how do you block buyers that have low feedback?
So if you go back into your eBay account, this is if you have a store. If you don't have a store, it might be slightly different, just cuz they have things set up different. But you go into my eBay and seller preference, seller preferences and go under blocked buyers list.
So we had to dig for this a little bit because they move stuff around all the time. And you have to go into buyer requirements. So then there'll be a checkbox.
Rob: So block buyers list, there's on the right hand side of the column, it says edit, click on edit, and then it'll take you to the next page.
Melissa: Yeah. And then you'll go into buyer requirements and then you'll scroll down.
You'll see there's a, there's just things that you can make sure that the buyers have. What were some of the other things I meant to write about?
Rob: You can stop the buyer with five or less feedback from actually being able to contact you. You can turn that on and off as well, cuz some buyers, if you do have that off, they might not be able to bid on your item because of the feedback, but they can email you or message you through eBay and say, hey, I'm interested in this. But if you're dealing with scammers, yeah, they're gonna scam.
Melissa: That would be the reason why I wanna block anyways.
Rob: Exactly. They're gonna scam you and try to message you anyways and tell you why you should sell them the item and how they're gonna scam you and do it.
So, that is usually, you want that set off anyways. You don't want somebody who has less than five feedback contacting you and trying to convince you to sell it to them. Yeah, when they're probably gonna scam you anyways.
Melissa: And you can also, there is a block buyers list, like you can put in individual users.
Yeah. I think over the, how many years that we've had this account, you have like three people in there. Like you, we haven't had to block many, but sometimes if people are, you don't, if you, especially if you're high volume, you don't want somebody you had a problem with coming back to try to buy something else from you because most likely they're just a difficult customer.
Yeah. They're not all the time difficult, but there are difficult people out there that just want, want everything for free. So you can block those kind of people that have given you a hard time in the past or just, you know, ask so many questions and then don't pay. And you can also give them non-paying bidder, right?
Or is it non paying?
Rob: No. eBayy does all that now.
Melissa: Oh, you don't do it?
Oh, okay.
Rob: So eBay has records of when somebody bids on it, if they don't pay it. Just like this guy the last couple days who bought something, I don't have to do anything else. Once he doesn't pay for it after four or five days, eBay will put a mark on his name, not that anybody else can see, but they know they'll put the mark, that they know that he bought however many items.
They'll just keep adding him up and after so many items, eBay says they revoke his name or, or don't let him come and bid on anything once he does that multiple times. So yeah, but eBay keeps track of that on the back office. You used to be able do, used to do that.
Melissa: You used to have to request it right ?
Rob: Yeah. Used to be able to do that. Now you don't do it anymore. eBay sees it because the payments go through them. Oh, that's right. They know when the items paid for, if the items not paid for. So they mark it once, it doesn't happen. And, yeah, they give him a, a, a check against his name or a, a bad mark against his name.
Melissa: So, so should you block buyers with low feedback on eBay?
It's a kind of a loaded question cause it depends. I guess the answer is, it depends. Are you a new seller? You might want to in the beginning to help eliminate scammers. Yep. If you are not a new seller, you might want to, if you do high volume and you notice that there are a large amount of the people who don't pay or send offers and they don't pay, and it's a hassle.
But it, for us, in our business model, we don't. So if you are selling kind of more larger items or maybe less volume, or maybe you notice it in your high volume store too. It might be worth it for you to still accept buyers that are new because there are new people coming to the platform all the time too.
And like the Google thing, I feel like is the biggest thing for us. Absolutely. Like people are finding us on Google because they're searching for that item across all marketplaces and it comes up. So I think that that, and then they create an account because it's for a price that. So, yep, absolutely.
Rob: So, so, cool. Well, if you guys want it, oh, sorry, go ahead.
Melissa: I was just gonna add that we wanna start answering some more of these questions, oh yeah like this, so if you have a question that you wanna submit to us or create, we just created a form that you can go and submit your question. So if you go to fleamarketflipper.com/question, then you can go fill out that form, just your name and your question and hopefully we can answer it on one of these podcasts.
Rob: Awesome. You guys rock. Thanks for spending some time with us today. We greatly treasure the time we get to spend with you. We will see you guys on the next episode.